Seven weeks ago, when we first reported Vista was causing many machines to stall indefinitely while deleting, copying and moving files, we were sure the problem was caused by a bug that would be fixed relatively quickly. After all, Vista is Microsoft's flagship product. It's also an operating system. And everyone knows deleting …

COMMENTS

Page:

Wait for SP1

I recently bought a new Vista laptop to replace an XP machine, and boy does the anecdote ‘wait for the first service pack’ ring true. While I could read my entire laptop drive on another XP machine, Vista really didn’t like the idea. Altering file security settings on the drive helped, but still failed to copy key folders without any warning. One tip is don’t try to do a bulk copy with OneCare enabled, not only will Vista have trouble reading files, it will also quite randomly fail to write them too, and bombard you with ‘try again’ messages! Don’t get me started on the intermittently working keyboard shortcuts or random startup changes in screen resolution…

Downgrade to XP available

I can endorse the earlier comment about nVidia drivers in Vista - our system doesn't show half the controls (including screen resolution!) in the nVidia control panel, and the PnP (Ha!) monitor doesn't.

Local dealer has just told me it is possible to install XP with Vista licence code - it will fail, but will prompt a call to MS, who will give you one that works, apparently...

Compressing not deleting

Why does it take so long to delete 23GB of data? Cos it ain't deleting it.

I imagine MS has done a deal with the FBI or DHS, MI5 etc etc so that a Vista machine never deletes anything.

From what I can tell so far about Vista, its DRM, its ability to delete software it doesn't like and from the terms & conditions of the licence, every Vista machine is owned by Microsoft with a written-in backdoor for all those agencies who signed up and probably help make MS so rich.

So, why so long to delete 23GB? Ever tried zipping up 23GB of data? It takes a long time.

I rest my case.

I dont blame Bill Gates. I blame George Orwell. This was all his stupid, brilliant, amazing, frightening idea and the human race has to go through it all, I think, to be able to sift out from the ashes a better way of how to run this planet. But, before it gets better it usually always gets worse. That's just the way it goes.

For God's sake LINUX espousing muppets shut up, you're spoiling it for all of us.

Why is it that every time I read any Microsoft related article in here there's always some pillock making snide "you should be using Linux then" type comments.

I've been using LINUX for years. That's my choice, and I like it, and to be honest for a lot of people on this site you'll be preaching to the converted anyway. If however I go to a LINUX forum and look at bug reports I don't see loads of comments to the effect of "you never get that in Windows." It's poor form, it's making the rest of us more moderate LINUX users look bad, and it's making you personally look like the sort of narrow minded twit that the open source movement could do without the support of. A bit like the standard clueless nit you always get propping up the pub bar opining about something he knows very little about to anyone that'll listen. If you don't like Microsoft products then fair enough, many of us don't - but surely that means you have no real opinion on Microsoft related stories?

Very Disappointed

I use Vista purely as a media center and I am horrified at the number of bugs in the OS. Applications that don't window when I click the button, but do it the second time. The inability of Vista to reconnect to a network when brought out of suspend. Utterly appalling driver support, admittedly not MS's fault, but directly related to them allowing XP drivers to be used for the RC releases. My performance has halved since moving to Vista, my machine runs 6C hotter...

I could go on.

I will just single out nVidia though as be so far off the mark with their driver support it is untrue. I actually removed my nVidia graphics card and went to the onboard graphics chip to get basic things like a monitor functioning correctly. I now get better performing media center, my monitor doesn't turn off randomly, I can suspend my machine without wondering whether I'll get a monitor when it comes back on. It really isn't good enough at all. (Oh and I ought to point out, these are WHQL certified drivers where nothing works).

Not rare, just uncooked.

Vista won't even properly copy/move files from one system to another if there are any permissions differences between them.. I have a NAS and it will start to copy, but abort it at various levels.. Its a shame I have to flip over to a FTP over SSH to get it working reliably.

This is a big problem when you are moving/copying several gigs of data.

Windows has always done this!

Windows has ALWAYS taken ages to copy or delete files. Goodness knows why it does, but it's certainly not a new problem.

I know of no other OS that has such problems handling files, killing processes, communicating over a network, logging off, or shutting down. All these things seem to stall it at one time or another; I mean, WHY can it take Windows ages to shut down? For goodness sake - it's easy - all it has to do is pull the bloody plug!

(untitled)

I have not heard about copying problems from the dozen or so vista users where I live, but since it is late at night here, I can't be bothered to wake them up until tomorrow.

I wonder if there has been any code like some from windows 2K comments like "this is my first c program", "I don't really understand this but it seems to work" (this had a reply "I don't know either, leave it alone"), which were all reported to have been in the source code. I think the forst of those was from FDISK, and had been in every 32-bit windows at least up to XP.

From what I have read, some of the problem appears to be from the fooling around generating thumbnails. This seems to be something vista does badly, since both Tiger and XP manges to generate thumbnails for, between them most file types which can have thumbnails, and don't seem to waste huge amounts of time doing so. (I am not a Mac fan, I just use them at Uni. I have used OpenSuse/KDE, XP home and pro, adn Tiger in the lst two months, and they are all better for some things than otehrs, except for XP home). Under XP i have tried to cut down on teh use of Tumbnails, since I have better things to waste HDD space on than pretty pictures to remind me whats in files with stupid names. If I can't figure out what a file is for from its location adn name, that tells me to rename it, not use a pretty picture to remind me.

Mmm.

I just love being categorised as "gay" or "useless" or "inexperienced" for expressing the opinion that "My next laptop will be a mac".

Why ? Is it MS Bashing?

No. After some 22 years in IT, and over 15 years beating my head against windows (and other related MS crap) that the computers job is to do what I tell it.

Its not my job to rebuild the sodding thing every six months, download patches every night (and pray they dont lock my machine up - as XP did this week), etc, etc.

I want a solid machine I can depend on (*again, as I used to depend on XP till a year ago), that doesnt actually need 2+ hours a week care and maintenance.

So a mac - since its built on BSD or some other fairly secure kernel, fits the bill perfectly. Or perhaps Unbunto/Debian/Fedora/Suse. Whatever.

No doubt I'll curse and swear at it on occasion, and no doubt I'll write shonky code that kills it. Fine. I can live with that. I can live with the consequences of what *I* do.

What gets on my t*ts is the MS sycophants claiming that;

1. Its not a problem.

2. Every other platform is *gay*, indexperienced, etc

3. We're the market leader - get over it.

4. There's no choice.

Well, there is a choice. I choose life. I choose moving off windows for my core work, and will tirelessly point out to the blinkered CIO's out there who seem to live on Gartners/Forresters tit that its their job to provide reliable and secure infrastrucuture.

more weirdness

talking about weird bugs in vista, some people have been experiencing funny beeps when using programs with listview controls, like the one used in explorer to show files. It's maddening, since whenever you move the cursor or select an item you get a sound. I have seen many people moaning about it but no solution yet

Asta la Vista!!

Yet another nail in the vista coffin.

Say what you want but Dell, with the upcoming withdrawal of OEM XP on new pre-builds, are now selling PCs with Ubuntu on. This to me is a complete summary of the industry's thoughts on vista. Dell obviously think that forcing vista on people is not a way to sell many PCs. I think they're right.

My XP and Linux installs are staying firmly put. My boss (Head of IT) has made it completely clear that we are under no circumstances upgrading to vista pre- SP2.

Maybe they should have made it free? People tend not to mind if something isn't perfect if it's free.

Business as usual

Neophytes

Most, if not all, problems with Linux are caused by the end users themselves for not properly understanding what they are doing. Some people above are complaining about wifi cards and ndiswrapper not working just because they lack the intelligence to comprehend simple ndiswrapper tutorials. Chances are their wifi cards are natively supported in the kernel and they just have no experience in configuring and compiling the kernel.

It could be worse

I mean it isn't like Vista is MS Bob 2.0 or is it? Perhaps they could play an animation and have the little dog dig into the screen to fetch a file for moving and copying. The pernicious pup could also chew it to shreds for delete. We won't get into the whole recycling bit without a special setting in the parental controls window.

Spinning Beach Ball of Wait ..n wait n wait....

You want to talk about the "never ending .... WAIT"?

Let's talk about FIVE incarnations of Mac OS X (since 10.0.x, I was a beta tester) with the deep gene embedded endless Spinning Beach Ball of WAIT n wait n wait n wait! Do anything on stupid OS X (and stupid is correct), from simply launching another App while others are running, or connecting to an exterior NAS, opening a file or doc, previewing a picture file, launching a browser, EVEN shutting down and you are more likely than not with see the endless Spinning Beach Ball of WAIT n wait n wait n wait!

Why? Because OS X is STUPID, literally and you can thank BSD for that because it's in the "Genes". Indexing always Sucked on BSD and Apple never fixed it. OS X gets "lost" looking for files, applications and libraries to complete functions, and often these and preferences get corrupted. Lets not even begin about the HORRIBLE disk fragmenting the happens on OS X and the lack of Defrag tool!

OS X IS STILL NOT A TRUE (operative word) MULTI TASKING Operation System (thanks to BSD and UNIX) as Windows is, which is WHY you NEVER see any delays doing these things in Windows since 95 or in Linux.

So don't give me this shit about this seldom seen bug in Vista that's really just a rare poor upgrade installation of Vista, likely over a cludged previous version of Windows. With over 12 thousand PCs (only 2300 Macs now) on my US school district docket that I administer, WE'VE NEVER SEEN THIS PROBLEMS ..... probably 'cause we know what we're doing! BUT, EVERY Mac (10,4.9) HAS the endless Spinning Beach Ball of WAIT n wait n wait n wait!

This problem existed in RC1 and to some extent RC2 too. I did report it, and it’s partially fixed but still not good. Microsoft at the time blamed my Cisco router.. Anyway, I get really poor intermittant network performance. It turns out this is due to a new addition in the TCP/IP stack called Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level.

To check the status of this feature, run “netsh interface tcp show global” at a command prompt.

You will see something like:

Querying active state…

TCP Global Parameters

———————————————-

Receive-Side Scaling State : enabled

Chimney Offload State : enabled

Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level : disabled

Add-On Congestion Control Provider : none

ECN Capability : disabled

RFC 1323 Timestamps : disabled

In this example, you can see I have it disabled. (My network performance returns to normal with it off!).

What about Windows Server 2008?

My favorite Vista bug so far...

Using a FAT32 secondary drive for storage of media, misc. As such, it should have no applicable security. I loved it when I was trying to access my files & Vista told me that I needed permission from 'everyone' to access my files. Hmm.. that might take a while.

Rare?

@ Simon: "think this problem is incredibly rare, and it's been hyped up purely to bash vista."

I have been forced to use Vista on a new desktop at $DAY_JOB (I am half the IT team and the entire Help Desk here, so I must be familiar with this travesty of an OS in order to help my users when they're forced to switch).

It isn't necessary to hype this particular flaw to bash Vista. There's enough wrong with Vista that it isn't necessary to hype *any* of the flaws. For example, out of seven mission-critical software applications we use, only one works with Vista - and oddly enough, that one is Remote Desktop Client, which is bundled with Vista.

It's not Vista, it's Explorer.

The problem isn't Vista itself. Vista's filesystem APIs work just fine. The problem is Vista's version of Explorer. So, rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, try using a good file manager (which doesn't just use Explorer's file copy APIs) on Vista instead of switching back to XP.

Directory Opus 9, a product I love, supports Vista and I've been using it on Vista since January. Except if you delete files to the Recycle Bin (in which case the only documented method is to use the Shell/Explorer API), it bypasses Explorer's file copy/move/delete code and works as well as it did on XP. It also shows 1/2 or 1/4 as many UAC prompts as Explorer does for the same operations, removing the other common complaint about Vista/UAC.

end of microsoft ?

When...

Oh, when will Windows be ready for the desktop? People should be asking, methinks. The Windows fanboys are desperate to justify their huge expense in hardware just to see some little "improvement" and a few cool (or annoying?) effects. If all you want is pretty displays and stuff like that, buy a nice fish tank. It's gonna be much more entertaining, relaxing, environmentally friendly... If you do real computing and have need for speed and stability, there are real OSes out there that don't need next years hardware to just turn on.

That's what you get for *buying* alpha releases. Suckers. Well, except the poor folks who have no choice and are forced to use Vista. I'm sincerely sorry for you, and I wish there was a way to diminish your pain.

Yeah, yeah, all software has some trouble here and there (although, copy/move/delete is way too pathetic...). But I'm not the one who had to sell a kidney to buy the newest, most powerful machine plus a bunch of bloatware just so I can write and send emails. See, "you get what you paid for" is not always true. :-)

I am not a microsoft programmer, but...

I know that in XP, when you delete something, you're really only removing the directory pointer to that file's location on the disk. That's easy. Perhaps Vista is actually deleting the data, rather than merely the pointer to it??

MAC demonic spinning beach ball not fault of BSD

@Webster Phreaky. Mac OSX well-known single-tasking tasking nature is due to the unrefactored old "cooperative-multitasking" single-threaded OS9 Mac code layered over the top of BSD. BSD itself is very good at multi-tasking. The end result is the embarrassing result you see on Mac compared to Windows.

Clueless Bill...

"No. After some 22 years in IT...its not my job to rebuild the sodding thing every six months, download patches every night" I think Bill needs to consider a new line of work. I have never rebuilt an NT server for more than 10 years because the OS actually went bad. I haven't rebuilt an NT based client workstation in about 8 years. Given that Microsoft primarily only release patches once per month you must be utterly clueless if your patching every night. A few months ago I installed Ubuntu 6.06 and after rebooting it wanted to install about 300MB of updates. Software updates are just a fact of life no OS is immune from. Manage it correctly and it isn't a problem.

It's nice to see a few more responses attacking the endless and completely thoughtless comments that whenever a problem with Windows is found, the immediate answer is install Linux/Unix/Mac OSX. Words honestly fail me in describing how cretinous these remarks are. I mean, if this is the intellect of the average OS-of-choice evangelist then I really do they stick to that and keep away from Windows. The key point to understand is that system administrators don't exist in a vacuum. Even as a senior system admin myself, I don't actually get to choose what operating system to install/use. These kind of decisions are organisational and/or strategic and products like Windows are chosen for much more holistic reasons than what OS is best. Windows is generally chosen because (a) the installed base requires is (b) Windows itself is actually subordinate to the Windows-only applications businesses require, (c) it actually makes financial sense because support is plentiful and relatively cheap and (d) it isn't difficult to implement. There are always systems that are technically superior but none of them are ever going to be deployed in isolation. The endless Linux evangelism is an absolute turn-off for me and is a reason I would find it difficult to ever recommend it. The world needs Eric Raymond clones like a hole in the head.

PEBKAC?

"2. The majority of problems on any PC occur between the keyboard and the chair. So, users are pretty quick to tell you the problem is the computer and not them to try and hide a lack of competence."

You know, it's funny, Burton. I've been working with computers since before IBM thought it would be a good idea to repackage a sewing machine controller to try to compete with IMSAI and the other S-100 systems. I've seen a lot of different operating systems, and used most of them, including CP/M, PC-DOS, MS-DOS, GEM, MAC OS (prior to OX X), every flavor of MS Windows since 3.0, and a number of different Linux distributions. Here in the office, I don't get to choose what runs on the servers, so they are Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers; we have a number of machine tools, and with only one exception, they all run some flavor of Linux. The only problems I ever have with them is (a) they don't get a DHCP address from the Windows servers, which seem to have major issues finding room in their IP pools (100 addresses each) for the dozen-or-so clients,or (b) the one machine we have that uses Windows crashes - usually in the middle of a logn, expensive machining run.

And I can't think of any other operating system which has changed the user interface with every major release. Sure, Linux has offered *new* GUIs - but the old ones are still available and still work just fine. Whereas my database admin, who just got her new Vista PC, has spent the last half hour trying to figure out how to make the desktop look and work somewhat like the XP desktop.

So, maybe the problem is between the keyboard and the chair.

And maybe the problem is that we have trained all our users to use one interface, and then sudddenly we've taken that away and substituted something comeptley different - which doesn't work better, doesn't work faste, isn't more efficient, and isn't less expensive - it's jsut different *for the sake of being different.*

UK Downgrade Rights

Where I work in the UK we have downgrade rights. With each Vista licence bought we can install XP Pro via a volume select licensing deal for the education sector. Our corporate arm also has the same rights with a slightly different public sector deal, they still use Windows 2000 mainly :)

re: I am not a microsoft programmer, but...

Michael,

No, when you "delete" the file, you are generally moving it to the bin... the sort of delete you are talking about is more of a "scrub" where the system overwrites the space occupied by the file with 0's and 1's, and if it did that, the whole system would end up being unusable...

You will notice also that the slow file operations also hits file copying (copying my MP3 collection takes 15 minutes between PC and external hard drive on Win2000 (an up to 4 year old heinz-57 upgraded homebuilt, but 55 minutes on my brand new HP & Vista), so somthing is eating up the processor power doing somthing not really linked to copying...

Can we get a debug kernal for Vista? That should at least help pin down what the OS is doing when it should not...

Shell & API ?

When deleting vast quantities of files on some of my Win2K servers, I ended up using DEL /S on the command line. It just does what it's told, and does not think for 40 minutes before giving a wild assed guess about the time it may or may not need to delete the same files.

What is the link to vista? Easy: Isolate where the slowdown is coming from:

I have not yet tried it, but if you make 3 copies of a "heavy" folder, (then reboot to fool the cache), then delete:

1 folder by the Vista explorer (shell delete)

1 folder by DOS (del /s and rmdir /s) (DOS delete)

1 folder by a program (API delete)

and see if the delete times are different... this will enable you to find if the delete slowdown is coming from some shell module or handler, or directly from the API: remember that the shell is also doing some funky stuff, like generating thumbnails of films and images, that the command line and API cannot use. If they are all as slow as each other, then the culprit is somewhere in the kernal... Now, add that to a kernal debugger, like the Yank who patched the XP shell to wait 5 seconds before deleting a "locked" file...

Vista Hacking for Dummies

You may have to get your company's executive to get an NDA for that.

The publication is really Microsoft's internal system specifications manual for the Operating System, and details how Windows 95 was hacked to obtain each successive (but not necessarily successful) operating system. A companion manual is the internal marketing advisers' spin and obfuscate guidelines.

comedy!

I've spent the past 20 minutes reading & rereading all of the comments to this article and I have to admit I find it all incredibly amusing! You have the Mac, *nix & windows purists pointing out flaws of their least favorite OS's, you experiences IT folks basically saying screw it, I'm bailing on Vista until SP1 comes out and then you have the occasional spark of pure luck or genius who solves a problem that is specific to their machine but similar enough to a larger problem that it only fuels the mass confusion.

To add insult to injury, you have Microsoft giving everybody the silent treatment, which loosely translates to "yeah, we know there are problems but we haven't completed all of the root cause analysis's yet to know how much damage will be done if we implement the latest alpha patch"

This is better than watching a couple of monkeys attempt to fornicate with a football!

What makes it even funnier, is a lot of folks in here made the CHOICE to upgrade to vista OR went out and bought new equipment so they could get it... But alas, there are the poor folks who were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time and got stuck. I feel sorry for the latter, but sheer jubilation over the comedic value provided by the former...

As for me? I'm just a simple network geek... I don't give a rip about which OS does what, better or worse than another... PC's, workstations and servers are all a pain in the ass to me because they are the single significant contributer to the lack of bandwidth on my network...

RE: Re: Linux

Just because the seperate GUI and OS thing didn't work in Win9x doesn't mean its a bad idea.

I'll be the first to tell you that X badly needs to be recoded from scratch (this time with some planning and forethought,) but the opportunities for this setup are great.

How many OSes with fully integrated guis allow you to switch them at a whim? If you don't like KDE or Gnome or Fluxbox, you can just find an alternative, and there are loads of them out there. Chances are that there is someone out there with the same desktop tastes as yourself and an ability to program, which leads to awesome and unique desktop experiences.

With X you can run multiple window managers at a time, one on each VNC session, and even on totally remote computers.

More over, if your gui freezes, you can just switch over to a virtual terminal and restart it.

Linux shutdown

"I know of no other OS that has such problems handling files, killing processes, communicating over a network, logging off, or shutting down. All these things seem to stall it at one time or another; I mean, WHY can it take Windows ages to shut down? For goodness sake - it's easy - all it has to do is pull the bloody plug!"

Ah yes, and prey tell me why the other week I spent almost an hour trying to shut down my Fedora Core server when it refused to?

It turned out it had somehow locked up a file in such a way that the instant it tried to flush the filesystem to write any remaining data would cause a kernel dump (which it hides from the user), and any shutdown command, even the most abortive, just would bail out because of it. To work out what the hell was going on required me using my XP laptop to surf the net for clues and pour through endless excruciatingly cryptic man pages for help.

The only solution was to pull the plug, which is all your average user is going to do anyway.

Like XP with NTFS formatted partitions, the system came back up with no corruption despite pulling the plug.

What Linux fans also gloss over when moaning about bugs in Windows is the huge amount of bug fixes (a lot security related) in Linux. Run yum on Fedora in about the same frequency as Microsoft's usual patch release and guess what? Yep, there are lots of patches. In fact there are a lot MORE patches than XP has usually. That often includes the core of the system, the kernel. When I investigate them most say things about security issues.

And anyone who's ever run a web server will know that in the recent years most of the attacks are directed at applications and platforms that not only run on linux but grew out of unix/linux (mostly php and Apache related). Web servers on linux are probably the weakest point in the system especially as so many people don't have a clue about security in web servers and the need to patch not only the server, but the applications running on the web server as well.

Oh and as for the GUI and OS being separated. Actually that is a good thing... because you can disable the GUI :-)

Everything in it's place though. I love linux for the jobs it's best at, but it's not the angel people think.

RE: Neophytes

Thanks for proving my point, If it doesn’t work out of the box then it's no good for the end user. Granted Windows suffers it's problems but UNFORTUNATELY Linux isn’t yet good enough to take over as a desktop solution for the majority of business applications or home user's.

I doubt this will be another nail in the Vista coffin. Numerous businesses and some major financial institutes are only just rolling out XP. One of which I have done some work for and they are currently moving from NT to XP purely because the support for NT has expired. So I think once the bugs have been ironed out the bigger businesses will start to migrate over from Windows 2000 and XP to Vista some of which will just skip XP and go straight to Vista.

If you work in IT support use Vista's teething period to gain knowledge and experience in troubleshooting it and when the bigger company's migrate you will be in a better position to get the contract. If Windows worked perfectly there would be a lot of unemployed IT professionals.

Use cmd and xcopy until this is fixed...

I have seen this reported many times as well. I haven't seen it as much because I still use cmd for 90% of my file operations. MS needs to get this fix out broadly ASAP but sysadmins who want to stay on Vista should know that this issues appears in Explorer but not cmd (e.g., xcopy).

Windows Copying

Just as a side note, I have noticed forever that when copying a file in the Windows gui, the file always goes to swap first, then to its destination, even when the swap file is on the same partition or device as the source or destination. That causes loads of unnecessary seeking, reading, and writing. xcopy on the command line doesn't do any of that, so I've seen almost a 2x speedup on large copies using any computer with a swap file (The secret to Windows performance is to get enough ram so as that you can disable the swap file all together, since Windows uses it like you have 8mb of physical memory no matter what.)

Either way, looks like I'll be sticking with XP and Linux on my desktops.

Linux? Too right!

Yes...we, too are almost completely converted to Linux. Looks like our last Windoze box will be UPGRADED to Linux of some flavour this weekend. (My other half spends his spare time evaluating Linux and it's various distributions - I just use 'em.) Windoze & it's problems can suffer in a VM There are so few Windoze apps needed now, IMHO.

Ivan's comments fixed some Vista issues I was having

I was having long delays with some connectivity to systems in our DMZ or to systems on the internet (RDP to internet bound systems) and Vista would hang. Disabling the tcp/ip auto-tuning fixed the issues:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

Rock on.. This was the only issue I had with Vista. I'm VERY happy now, won't go back.